Free-to-play racing games don’t come by very often, and they are more of a unicorn in the indie space. Auto Drive has made its way to PC on the Epic Games Store and offers online racing, potential local multiplayer racing, and a lot of customisation. It also does it in a way that means a fair amount of the game can be unlocked for free if you play without too much of a horrible grind. There are quite a few ethical positives about Auto Drive, but for a launch title, it has a couple of design hiccups that may hold it back.
Upon starting Auto Drive, you’ll be given a base car and the option to buy a paint colour and customise the bonnet, spoiler and roof with some sporty options. These are all for aesthetic purposes and do not impact vehicle performance. Instead, that’s tied to upgrading the acceleration, power, and tyre grip of your vehicle with 6 levels of upgrade per part. These get progressively more expensive but never more than 2 race wins worth of cash. You’ll notice most cars are actually quite grippy when you get out into the racing, so my advice is to focus on top speed and acceleration. Tyres can be negated if you drive carefully.
Driving carefully isn’t initially your priority, though, as Auto Drive is a vehicular combat game. You can buy two weapons (from a small choice of four) and equip and upgrade them for your vehicle. Their ammo replenishes each lap of a race, but you can upgrade the ammo clip size. You’ll very quickly find out the first few corners of any race devolve into a shooting spree, and you’ll need to dodge everyone else’s fire. This means if you can escape early, then you can settle into racing rather than dodging explosions. I found this quite frustrating and wished there was a 5-second countdown to weapons being available as races are too stop-start early on. It disproportionately impacts the races because the tracks are so simple, and the cars handle so well, that racing rarely becomes the defining part of the race. Instead, it’s who survives the first few corners, and then who has the fastest accelerating car with the best top speed.
AI opponents upgrade their cars to match yours if you play offline in single-player mode. The seven AI sometimes are grossly under or overpowered and all too often, you’ll be left in 2nd place where one car is bombing down straight with a wild advantage over everyone else. The AI are also incredibly aggressive. They swerve when overlapping you on a straight and divebomb into corners and forget to brake. This is more apparent on tracks with crossovers (most of them) as they’ll actively void their current lap to try and hit you, and then get stuck. Sometimes, only half the cars are running properly at the end of a race, and that’s not very engaging.
As everything requires cash to upgrade or unlock, you’ll need to race often, and this is where my main issue with Auto Drive kicks in. There are only 3 locations for racing, and they total less than 10 tracks. Some of the desert tracks are extremely similar to each other, too, and this makes the grind incredibly monotonous far quicker than you’d expect. There is also only one mode, involving the weapons, and that means nothing feels different from race to race. You’ll need to race for over an hour to unlock a new car body, then another hour to upgrade it decently. You can then place it in your car park, where you can spend more in-game money to expand, but why bother initially when you need to spend it all on car upgrades first? If you want to, you can pay to get credits, but whilst Auto Drive’s micro transactions aren’t the worst out there, if you spend £10-15 pounds to unlock a few cars and upgrades, you’d have less of a game than just buying a fully formed game once and owning it in a traditional sense.
Every time I tried to race online, no one else was online to race with, so the community is small, as expected. I recommend a Discord or Teamspeak gathering with mates for online racing, and whilst I couldn’t test it, the options were clear at least. For local multiplayer, you’ll need to grind to unlock multiple cars to then get the local multiplayer to work.
This leads me to the fundamental question of who. Who does this game exist for? It’s too arcadey for sim racers, but with little payoff for arcade collectathon fans. I think if Auto Drive adds more tracks and modes over time, this has more of a value proposition, but for now, I’m confused as to who would spend hours on this when more polished and expansive racing games can be bought for the same price as a few microtransactions. Let’s see how Auto Drive develops, but for me, this isn’t a game I’ll actively return back to.
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